Giovan Francesco Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti (vol. 1, 1550; vol. 2, 1553) was the first European storybook to draw from oral folk sources that included fairy (wonder) tale material, thus initiating a great literary tradition. Previous collections had consisted of novellas, playful or serious stories of real society that lacked the wonder element, presented as a round-robin recitation by a select company of sophisticates gathered for this purpose at an elegant soirée. These Renaissance writers were known as novellieri because they called their tales novelle, and their great predecessor was Boccaccio, whose Decamerone (c.1351) was a model for Straparola. But Straparola chose to call his stories not novelle but favole, signaling his great innovation in adding orally-derived and fairy tale elements from popular culture. Thus we consider him the grandparent of numerous tale collections that followed, which eventually discarded the outer frame narrative. Having lost the fictional internal audience of connoisseurs, the tales were now directed solely at the external audience, the real-life readership. A century after Straparola came Giambattista Basile’s brilliant opus in Neapolitan dialect, Lo cunto de li cunti (also known as the Pentamerone) of 1664-66. The genre became popular in France and peaked in the late-seventeenth century in the Comtesse d’Aulnoy’s two volumes of Contes des fees published in 1697 and 1698, and in Perrault’s famous collection of 1697.
Straparola was not the most impressive stylist in this genre, but he was the first, and to him we owe the beginning of the great tradition of literary re-creation of what was previously in oral circulation, now embellished with fine language and a free intermingling of traditional motifs to create newly complex plots. Donald Beecher has done us an inestimable service with this new edition of Straparola with his brilliant and learned commentary on each of the tales. The last complete English version before Beecher’s was that of W. G. Waters in 1894 which bowdlerizes risqué passages (Straparola is the most obscene writer in this genre) and has some archaisms. Beecher has kept Waters as a base for an English prose version that reflects well Straparola’s straightforward and effective style. Readers will surely enjoy these tales for pure reading pleasure, and in the commentaries will find all their questions answered concerning each tale’s relation to oral sources and to other stories in the literary tradition, including ATU numbers and parallels in Basile, Calvino, Grimm, Comparetti, and other European collections, not to mention some from Middle Eastern traditions.
Beecher’s introduction masterfully surveys the historical, social, and literary context in which Straparola worked, and although very little is known about this author’s life and working methods (indeed the name Straparola is probably a speaking-name pseudonym, meaning "garrulous"), Beecher searches out all we can know about him and his debt to previously existing stories. This is a hopelessly elusive topic, and Beecher explores as well as one can the big question: how much of Straparola’s raw material was genuinely oral tradition and how much did he find already assimilated, to whatever degree, into written sources? The absence of known written sources, combined with Straparola’s use of many motifs found throughout the European oral tradition, leads Beecher to suggest tales in oral circulation as the primary, and perhaps sole, material that this author used (13). Beecher believes that Straparola did genuine fieldwork and considers calling him a “proto-folklorist” (40). Later on he describes his role more complexly, saying that his rich mixture of story types and traditions makes his collection “an ideal workbook for the study of the intersection between these several classifications—from the oral to the written, and from the folk tale to the fairy tale” (57). However we assess the balance between oral and written sources, it is clear that Straparola merits the title "Fairy Godfather" of the European tradition (Ruth Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
It will be the fairy or wonder tales that claim most readers’ attention because of their quality, longevity, and influence on future tale collections; but the fact is that only 17 (or possibly 14 or 15, depending on criteria applied) of Straparola’s 75 tales are fairy tales, 12 appearing in this first volume. The remainder are humorous tales, novellas, ghost and supernatural stories, beast fables, pseudo-histories, jokes, riddles, and the like. Yet these 17 include many prototypes that have become standards of the repertoire: among others “Puss in Boots” (“Constantino,” a tale which some think is largely Straparola’s invention), “The Master Thief” ("Cassandrino"), “The Pig Prince,” “The Serpent Maiden” (“Biancabella”), “Six Who Made their Way into the World” (“Ricardo”), and “All Fur/Peau d’Ane” (“Doralice and her Incestuous Father Tebaldo”). “Doralice” is an especially fine example of Straparola’s skill at combining elements from different story types, drawing on both the widely diffused Belle Hélène type and the Peau d’Ane type. Beecher’s extensive commentary on the most complex tales like “Doralice,” “Biancabella,” or “Fortunio, the King’s Daughter, and the Mermaid,” displays thorough mastery of scholarship in both folkloristics and the European written tale tradition.
There has been a long wait for a modern edition of Straparola’s classic, enriched with the kind of extensive commentary that the best of contemporary scholars can give us, with access to great libraries, an international network of interested colleagues, and supportive research staffs. Beecher graciously acknowledges these supports, but himself deserves full credit and admiration for having produced a superlative piece of work.
Volume One contains only 25 of the total 75 tales, with many of the longer ones and 12 of the 17 wonder tales. Inevitably, it lacks the index that will make Volume Two an indispensable companion volume to anyone who is using the volume here under review.
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[Review length: 954 words • Review posted on October 22, 2013]